Death at Wal-Mart

A poor schmuck at Wal-Mart got trampled to death during the Black Friday nonsense. He was an employee involved in opening the doors and when the crowd came in, they stepped all over him.

Rather like the company steps all over its employees, according to the UFCW. I actually agree that Wal-Mart employees should be able to join a union, and would love it if they did, but in the article I linked to above the United Food and Commercial Workers Union is using this as a wedge point. Not clever. Kinda tacky.

Also, as a side note, how the hell could someone be running into a store and not stop when they step on someone? I’d like to think I’d notice.

Oh, well. Greed makes fools of us all.

Living in a Material World

It’s the holiday season. Time for family, food, peace, togetherness and lots and lots of presents. Billions of dollars will be spent on them in the next few weeks. I myself will be hitting Amazon with my next paycheck and buying things to ship to friends and family.

Some people will bitch about this, of course, as they do about many things. They’ll decry the spending and say that it focuses on materialism, which is a popular thing to loathe. It’s not just the Christians, but pretty much every religion tells people they should cast aside material concerns and focus on the next world. Even those who are merely “spiritual”, whatever that means, tend to have the view that materialism = bad.

Well, I don’t focus on the next world. I focus on this one. I have to, since I have no evidence of anything like an afterlife. So my views on materialism, and material possessions, differ slightly.

I believe that there’s nothing wrong with being materialistic and accumulating a lot of goods. Why should there be? Given that this is the only life you get, shouldn’t you do what you can to enjoy that life? If you like fine wine, good books, great movies, and the like, shouldn’t you feel free to pursue those interests by buying wine, books and movies? Shouldn’t you do so by clicking links I put into articles so that Amazon will give me money? Yes, you should.

There’s some caveats to this, of course. You should be generous and give time and resources to help the less fortunate. You should certainly make sure you enjoy some of the non-material things in life, like a walk in the park and such. But as long as you’re meeting your expenses, doing what you can reasonably do to help others and enjoying the non-material aspects of life, why not spend much of the rest of the time enjoying the material ones?

Of course the religions say otherwise, but that’s because they don’t want people to get distracted from God. If someone sees a shinny thing and pays attention to that instead of what the man in the pulpit is saying, the church loses some of its influence. Can’t have that now, can we?

So focus on the material if you like. Why not?

So… Full…

So I write these blogs and post them based on GMT. This means that GMT right nows me at being on the 28th, but in Phoenix it’s the 27th. Still Thanksgiving.

Currently I’m cooking and getting ready to eat my turkey! So no posts today. I’ll be back in business tomorrow!

Some Thoughts On Thanksgiving

Hello, dinner!

Thanksgiving is supposed to be a day of, well, giving thanks. Most people will give thanks to the God they want to believe exists, but as an atheist, what am I to do?

Thanksgiving is always an important holiday to me. Not because of any latent religious inclinations, mind you, but rather because my family always celebrated the heck out of the day! We’d all get to together at my grandfather’s house in Kent, Washington. He was an amazing man. Born and raised in Oklahoma back during the 1920’s and 1930’s, he was a religious man, but in the “be good and honest and treat people right” kind of way. When he found out his eldest grandson was bisexual (though at the time I thought gay), it never bothered him, or if it did, he never let me see it. He made sure no one else in the family treated me any less, either.

Our family gatherings were impressive. It would be me, my mom and sister, my grandfather, my grandmother, my four uncles, their families and my one aunt and her family. After my grandmother died and my grandfather remarried, we had her side of the family join us.

A typical Thanksgiving dinner would consist of at least one turkey, a ham, a baked salmon, homemade cider, at least a couple large vats of mashed potatoes, deviled eggs, gravy served not so much in boats as in ships, a great deal of bread, cranberry sauce, plenty of drinks and many, many desserts. One year everyone brought so much dessert, in fact, that we had a pie for every single adult.

Eventually we stopped having dinner on Thanksgiving Day and moved it back a couple weekends. That way married people could celebrate with both sides of the family. It’s also quite close to my grandfather’s birthday.

After a few years we ended up with so many people at this little feast that we could no longer fit it in my grandfather’s house. Not even with three large tables and a couple kids’ tables in the garage. So we moved the celebration to my family’s church and held it there. That was big enough.

The last time I had Thanksgiving dinner with my family was in 2001. After that I moved to Palm Springs. A few years ago my grandfather died and everything moved to one of my uncle’s houses. I haven’t been back to Washington since, so I don’t know how it compares.

Even though I haven’t celebrated with my family in several years, I still have a little holiday for myself. I make up a turkey, mashed potatoes, pie, homemade bread, vegetables, all that good stuff. But since I left Seattle it’s been a meal for one. Oh, one year I had a couple friends turn up and was rather excited they’d done so, but it turned out they were only there for a few moments before they had to leave again.

This year things are a little different. I’m working on Turkey Day, so I’ll not be even starting to cook my dinner until about 6pm. That’s ok, though, cause I have a couple friends who are joining me. One is having dinner with his family earlier in the day, and doesn’t mind the idea of a second dinner. The other is working and doesn’t get off until 11pm. So the three of us should have a dandy dinner.

But this brings up a question: why? Why am I doing this aside from tradition? What am I thankful for and who am I thankful to, if not to a god?

The simple answer is I’m thankful for many things and to many people. Here’s a list.

I’m thankful for my mom for putting up with a lot of crap from me over the years, particularly during the dark days in 1995 and 1996.

I’m thankful for my dad, for providing me with a good philosophical grounding.

I’m thankful for my sister. Not for any special reason. Just because.

I’m thankful for my Grandma Irene, Grandpa Ted, Grandma Jane, Uncle Tom, Uncle Tim, Uncle Jim, Uncle Scott, Aunt Sara, Bernice and anyone and everyone else in the family for accepting me back into the fold despite certain unpleasant things in my past.

I’m thankful for my friends; Rob, Eric, Sean, Arthur, Nick, JK and anyone I’ve forgotten.

I’m thankful to live in the USA. I criticize a lot, but only cause I care and want it to be a better place.

I’m thankful to have a job. It isn’t the best, but it keeps me going.

I’m thankful to know myself much better than I ever have.

I’m thankful I’ve ever much more to learn.

A Bank Fails to Annoy Me! (kinda)

I’ve talked on a couple occasions about how unpleased I am with banks. See here and here for details. Short summary: I don’t like them and find them overly fee-happy.

Well, today I’m slightly pleased with my bank, JP Morgan Chase. Here’s why:

As of Saturday I had a balance of seven cents in my checking account. Not much, but that was ok since I didn’t plan to spend anything twixt then and payday. I did, however, have an automatic payment to my cell phone scheduled and that was cause for some concern.

Well, I delayed and piddled around and finally called my cell phone provider, T-Mobile, on Monday. They told me my account had already been charged. Apparently when they say your billing date is the 25th, they actually mean it’s the 23rd. So my account was overdrawn by $60.12.

Now with that and another transaction from Friday I was looking at two transaction being overdrafted to the tune of $70 in overdraft fees. This was not a happy possibility, so I called around and one of my friends loaned me the money to cover the charges. At 9:54pm on Monday I deposited the money in cash at an ATM (one of those neat ones that counts the cash you deposit). I figured that was that.

So I wake up on Tuesday and check my bank balance. It shows $1.88 which is what it should be. However it shows that both transactions cleared as being overdrafted and my deposit was listed as pending. This was not a happy situation. I called Chase and spoke with two different customer service people who assured me my account would not be charged for the overdrafts. I still spent a very sleepless night worrying.

So I woke up at 4am (nerves), and checked my balance. Sure enough, they’d charged me $70 in fees. I tried to get back to sleep and drifted in and out of that blessed state. I was concerned, see, cause I couldn’t really afford $70 in fees. I have to pay December’s rent with the paycheck I get on Friday, after all, plus some other things, so I was worried.

Eventually I woke up at about 6:55. I stayed awake, knowing the bank’s customer service department would open at 7am. When they opened, I called, ready for a fight! I told them about my situation and mentioned that two agents had told me I wouldn’t be charged. The agent I was talking to put me on hold. I twidled my thumbs for a bit and eventually she came back on the line with the good news that the charges were being reversed! Now my balance is $1.88 again and I’m happy, if somewhat sleepy.

But she did take great pains to explain to me that since I’d made the deposit so late in the day, I shouldn’t have expected it to count. Apparently making a deposit in cash at the bank’s ATM doesn’t count if it’s done after the end of the business day (about 5pm). I’d made deposits later than that and had them count in the past, but apparently in this case I got unlucky.

I don’t understand why they do this. As far as I’m concerned, if you get the money into the bank before midnight, fair go to you. That should be good enough, but it wasn’t. I really hope that during all the reforms and stuff we’re having with the banking system, one of the ones they make is something to correct this.

I was also very unimpressed by the fact that the bank apparently processes pending transactions in order from largest to smallest. This means that, say, you go out and buy three sodas over the course of a day. Each is a dollar. You have $5 in your account so now you have $2 left. Let’s suppose that you then end up with a charge on your cell phone like I had. Now you’re overdrawn by $60 with four pending transactions. In theory the fair way to process this is either from smallest to largest, so you pay only one fee, or by date, so that you pay only one fee.

But instead my bank, and probably others, process from largest to smallest. This means your first transaction that gets processed is the cell phone charge. That leaves you overdrawn so that when the other three post you end up with four overdrafts. If those are $35 each, you’re suddenly on the hook for $140 in fees.

I know of course that the solution to this problem ultimately lies with the customers. We need to keep better track of our money so we don’t overdraft to begin with. That said, banks need to be limited as to the level of punishment they can inflict on customers who do overdraft, because the current system is seriously broken.

So, to sum up: kudos to Chase for reversing the fees they’d charged, and a big “Fuck you!” to Chase for charging them in the first place, as well as for some of their other, rather odious practices.

Conspiracy Theories and You!/Mass-Media Nonsense – The Roswell Incident

Roswell, New Mexico - Nothing special happened here, unless you can prove otherwise!

On or about July 7, 1947, an experimental weather balloon crashed near Roswell, New Mexico. Due to over enthusiasm on someone’s part, a press-release was sent out saying that they had found the remains of a “flying disk”. A correction was issued later that day, everyone realized their mistakes, and that was the end of it.

Well, at least it was the end of it in the world of reality.

The story was largely ignored until the 1970’s when it began to become widely known within UFO fanatic circles. Then it eventually wormed its way into the national consciousness where it has, sadly, resided to this very day, despite the efforts of the media to do basically nothing to dislodge it.

Due to the combination of conspiracy theories centering around this (“The guv’mint covered it up!”), and the fact that the media acts as a willing accessory in this story (“What really happened at Roswell? We’ll give you the official information, then lots of innuendo and baseless statements we’ll present as reality and let you decide!”), this article fits neatly into both the Conspiracy Theories and You! and Mass-Media Nonsense! categories here on my blog. True, most conspiracy theories touch both areas, but this one is especially egregious.

In many ways this is the grand-daddy of conspiracy theories. It ties in the idea of aliens visiting the Earth and shadowy, government cover-ups of this, and possibly other, UFO events. I’d say it’s second only to the Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy Theories in popularity and importance.

Of course there’s no actual evidence that it was a flying saucer or a disk or anything other than a weather balloon that was recovered at the crash site. Naturally the absence of any evidence is, to some thinkers, perfect proof that what they say happened, happened. After all, if the government covered it up, how could there be any evidence?

Because of this lack of evidence, all that we have are memories of a few people. Memories which were doubtless corrupted by time, wishful thinking, an eagerness to please, fame and money. This is part of why eyewitness accounts of events are not always reliable; everyone sees things differently. I’m not saying anyone is actually deliberately lying about what they witnessed, I’m just saying that they might not be providing an accurate picture of what actually happened.

The media is completely complicit in this whole thing, of course. If they didn’t talk about it so much, we wouldn’t know about it, at least not the extent that we do. If the mainstream media did their job (ie: “There is no evidence at all of any alien craft or bodies or of any sort of government cover-up of these events” instead of doing their usual wink, nod, spreading their hands, grinning inanely and saying, “Well, no one knows for sure!”), this whole thing wouldn’t have reached the point it’s at now.

Here’s a great example. Check out this video from CNN. Now at one point Miles O’Brien (and I love the fact that at one point O’Brien was hosting a news show with someone named Kira), says, “Are we ever gonna know what really happened?” Well, of course we are. We do. A weather balloon crashed. That’s what all the evidence points to. No evidence points to an alien spacecraft.

Consider also an interview with an old woman in that video. The incident happened when she was twelve. In 1947. Sixty-one years ago! Surely it’s entirely possible that after all that time, with her being told by various people that, oooo, it must’ve been a UFO, she might’ve started thinking, well, maybe, and her imagination began to fill in the blanks. Speaking just for myself I’d have a tough time recalling the details of a warm August night in 1986 when I first had sex. I can recall that it happened, but it was twenty-two years ago. My recollection of the fine details is hazy at best and I’m sure much of what I remember isn’t quite how it happened. That’s a little more than a third of the time this woman is talking about. I’m sure that in 2047 (ooooh! 100 years after Roswell! Coincidence? I THINK SO!), my memories of something that happened in 1986 will be even hazzier than they are now.

Please note: I’m not saying she’s lying. I think she really believes what she’s saying. That doesn’t make it true and it’s a great example of why eyewitness evidence is not the best.

Of course it’s not too late to correct this nonsense. All the media has to do is stop covering Roswell. Just do that until there’s some real, verifiable, hard evidence of anything other than the official government story of what happened that night. Until then, they should be responsible and do their jobs and ignore this idiocy.

As for the conspiracy theorists, you guys need to get a life. There’s no proof of what you say (not that that stops you). If you have proof, please come forward. But you don’t. Instead you come forward with the usual collection of innuendo and half-baked theories that aren’t supported by any evidence.

Also remember this folks: yes, there’s probably aliens out there. I’ve written about that before. But they probably aren’t coming here to observe us. Why would they? What makes us that interesting?

And no, the government isn’t covering up alien contact. Again, why would they? What does it gain them? You can make the usual noises about “national panic” but I think after 9/11 we can all say the public isn’t quite as panic-prone as we might think. On that day there were some uncomfortable moments and bad choices by some members of the public (like my sister who pulled her kids out of school and her money out of the bank), but most people kept their heads and watched the news.

I know this conspiracy theory won’t go away. It makes too much money for the people involved. I also know the media won’t stop covering it. It makes too much money for them. But is it too much for me to want to hold everyone to a higher standard?

Oh, well. I’m sure anyone from the conspiracy crowd will simply say that I’m delusional or in the pocket of the government. If that’s the case, damn it, I want a paycheck!

The Incredible Shrinking Case

I wrote a few weeks back about an eight-year-old boy who has been charged with murder. Well, since then his case has gained some serious national attention, including video footage of his interrogation (minus a lawyer or his mother), and then, today, the prosecutor in the case announcing that one of the charges against the boy would be dropped. That, in conjunction with the judge allowing the boy to go home for Thanksgiving and the problems with the interrogation, make me relatively sure that it won’t be long before the case is dismissed entirely.

And well it should be! This is a travesty. As I mentioned in my original article, the kid is eight! Let me repeat that: He’s eight fucking years old! There is no justification at all for charging him. He did not have the capacity to form intent or to really understand what he was doing. Why? Because he’s eight!

I know there’s some people out there who still think he should be charged (one of my friends, for one, who when I said, “This kid doesn’t even really know what he was doing,” he said, “He knows they’re dead and he isn’t.”), and I’m sure there’s people who think he should be tried as an adult. But really? He should be let off scott-free. Yeah, it chaffes to let someone “get away with murder”, but when they aren’t capable of understanding it, it’s not murder.

Besides, he hasn’t “gotten away” with anything. Can you imagine how fucked-up this kid will be for the rest of his life? Therapy forever might come close to helping him live a normal life, but probably not.

So let him go. He’s suffered enough.

A Hell of a Place

God loves you this much!

God loves you. He cares about you. He is perfect and his love and care for you is perfect. He is all loving, all forgiving, all merciful and all wonderful.

Which is why if you don’t believe in him you’re going to spend all of eternity being tortured.

Yes, kids, today we’re talking Hell!

According to most of the religious (ie: Christians), God is indeed all those wondeful things I described. He loves, cares, forgives, etc. If you lie, cheat, murder and engage in all sorts of evil, you can still go to Heaven if you only ask God’s forgiveness! That’s how much he loves you! But if you commit the horrible, evil sin of just not believing in god, well, there’s no hope for you and you’re off to spend eternity in Hell.

Consider what that means. Eternity is, well, forever. It means from now until… well, there is no until. There’s just forever. Consider the following description of eternity from Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. It happens during a discussion between Crowley (a demon, currently drunk), and Azriphale (an angel, currently drunk), who have just found out the Anti-Christ has been born and the end of the world is nigh:

“Just you think about it,” said Crowley, relentlessly. “You know what eternity is? You know what eternity is? I mean, d’you know what eternity is? There’s this big mountain, see, a mile high, at the end of the universe, and every thousand years there’s this little bird-”
“What little bird?” said Azriphale, suspiciously.
“This little bird I’m talking about. And every thousand years-”
“The same bird every thousand years?”
Crowley hesitated. “Yeah,” he said.
“Bloody ancient bird, then.”
“Okay, and every thousand years this bird flies-”
“-limps-”
“flies all the way to this mountain and sharpens its beak-”
“Hold on. You can’t do that. Between here and the end of the universe there’s loads of-” The angel waved a hand expansively, if a little unsteadily. “Loads of buggerall, dear boy.”
“But it gets there anyway,” Crowley persevered.
“How?”
“It doesn’t matter!”
“It could use a spaceship,” said the angel.”
Cowley subsided a bit. “Yeah,” he said. “If you like. Anyway, this bird-”
“Only it is at the end of the universe we’re talking about,” said Azriphale. “So it’d have to be one of those spaceships where your descendants are the ones who get out at the other end. You have to tell your descendants, you say, When you get to the Mountain, you’ve got to-” He hesitated. “What have they got to do?”
“Sharpen its beak on the mountain,” Crowley said. “And then it flies back-”
“-in the spaceship-”
“And after a thousand years it goes and does it all again,” Crowley said quickly.
There was a moment of drunken silence.
“Seems a lot of effort just to sharpen a beak,” mused Azriphale.
“Listen,” said Crowley urgently. “the point is that when the bird has worn the mountain down to nothing, right, then-”
Azriphale opened his mouth and Crowley just knew he was going to make some point about the relative hardness of birds’ beaks and granite mountains, and plunged on quickly.
“-then you still won’t have finished watching The Sound of Music.”
Azriphale froze.
“And you’ll enjoy it,” Crowley said relentlessly. “You really will.”

So eternity is, well, eternal. Never-ending. This means that if you, say, killed someone and went to Hell as punishment you wouldn’t spend a hundred years there. You wouldn’t spend a million years there. You could spend the entirety of human history there, multiply that by a billion or so, and you’d still be there!

Not just there, but there being tortured in ways that make waterboarding look harmless. So you’d have never-ending pain and torment, and you’d be stuck there forever. No matter what. You’d be there for all eternity. There’d be no hope of release, no forgiveness. You’d be there forever.

Consider the worst person you could possibly imagine. Someone who mixes the combined evil of Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Mao, and bin Ladden. Someone who kills a billion people. Let’s say that when that person dies, she goes to Hell (why “she”? Why not?). A billion times a billion years go by. One billion years for each person she killed. At the end of that time, she’s still there. A quadrillion years go by, and she’s still there. Still suffering. Still being punished. What Ebon Musings describes as, “Infinate punishments for finite sins“. No matter how ever and horrible someone is, no one who really loves and cares about others could justify them spending eternity being punished.

I would argue this is a seriously broken form of afterlife. Surely everyone deserves a chance to learn from their mistakes and eventually be released from a place like Hell. How can anyone believe that eternity of fire and misery and cruelty and punishment is something that should be visited upon anyone? You’d have to be very cruel yourself to think that was a good way of doing things.

I would say that only a very evil being could create a place like Hell and actively send people to it. How evil would God have to be to make such a place? What does it say about humans that we would create such a being as God (since we did make him up, after all), say that he’s all loving and stuff, and then create in our minds a place like Hell (which of course we would never go to, but people we don’t like would).

But remember, God loves you. He loves you so much that you could be someone like Hitler, who was responsible for the deaths of millions, but if you converted on your deathbed and asked God’s forgiveness, you’d go to Heaven. On the other hand, if you committed the horribly unforgivable sin of being a good, decent, hardworking, loving person who just didn’t believe in God, you’d go to Hell and suffer eternal punishment.

That’s how much God loves you.

DVDecline

Good article on the New Yorker blog today. It mostly talks about the decline in DVD sales, but it also pretty much sums up my feelings on the whole Blu-Ray thing. I figure I’ll pick up a Blu-Ray player in the next couple years, likely in the form of a PS3, since there will come a time when studios will release only on Blu-Ray.

But otherwise? The quality difference between Blu-Ray and regular DVDs is not sufficient for me to have any interest in transitioning my collection over. Frankly Blu-Ray, along with HD-DVD, was a pointless inclusion in the home video market. DVD’s are cheaper and get the job done just fine. We shouldn’t have had this generation of video format and should’ve instead just skipped to the next format, which will be a system of “on demand” and direct movie downloads to a TiVo-like device. It’ll end up being cheaper for the studios and easier for the consumers.

Oh, well. I’m not the one in charge of such things. Yet.

Seriously, People… Don’t Hug Pandas!

Loveable? Huggable? Yeah, not so much.

CNN has a story today about a college student in China who broke into a panda enclosure in a zoo. Apparently this young fool thought the panda was cute and wanted to “cuddle him”. Oddly, the panda wasn’t interested in this strange person coming at him and instead bit the guy’s arms and legs, sending him to the hospital. Well, the panda didn’t send him there. People did. You get the idea.

This same panda apparently went through something similar a couple years back, and another panda at a zoo in Beijing attacked a teenager who was stupid enough to jump into the animal’s area while it was being fed.

There’s a few lessons to be drawn from this. The first is, “Don’t try to hug pandas!” Yes, they’re cute, but they are bears, and will attack you.

The second is, “Should we really be interfering with natural selection?” Perhaps if these people are so stupid as to try and hug pandas, they ought to have whatever happens to them happen, so as to remove them from the gene pool and enhance the species as a whole…

Ah, I’m not that cynical. I’m glad these fools survived the attacks, but let’s not do this anymore, ok, people? Pandas are not your friends. Though they are cute… I bet it would be fun to hug one…